U12 - «Titus Andronicus 2.0»
This production was staged at the World Shakespeare Festival of the Globe Theatre in the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad and was the only theatre programme from Hong Kong to be invited.
Titus Andronicus, Roman general, returns after 10 years of war with the Goths, victorious and with prisoners-of-war – Tamora the Queen of Goths, her three sons and her slave-lover Aaron the Moor – in tow.
But his triumph doesn’t last long. For his sacrificial killing of Tamora’s eldest son to his own dead sons sparks off a horrifying cycle of vengeance and carnage...
Drenched in blood, featuring murder, dismemberment, cannibalism and other grisly abominations, Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare’s most harrowing play, controversial in its time and still today.
More than 400 years later, minimalist theatre practitioner and director Tang Shu-wing revisits that infamous play with Titus Andronicus 2.0, a work at once bold and revolutionary.
Focusing on the very essence of theatre – bringing actors before spectators – with just a bare stage, live music, seven chairs and seven actor-narrators who switch between narrating the action and embodying the characters with intense physicality, Tang’s reinterpretation leads audiences through the black hole of the human psyche into a world of primal energy, boundless imagination, self-reflection, self-discovery and cathartic peace.
Director of the show, Tang Shu-wing has been described by Parole Magazine as “one of the most talented theatre directors of Hong Kong".
